


Human Remains

by verdenal



Category: Mindhunter (TV 2017)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Sharing a Bed, Supernatural Elements, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:54:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28147155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verdenal/pseuds/verdenal
Summary: Post-s2. Holden thinks he might being paying a price for something.It’s been seeping into him since Kemper grabbed him in the hospital.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 23
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Human Remains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lapsedpacifist](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapsedpacifist/gifts).



> This shockingly accurate from a timeline perspective somehow.
> 
> Dear Yultide recipient: I hope you like it! I tried in incorporate a lot of your requests: angst, unrequited love, supernatural AU. I had a lot of fun writing it!!!

It’s been seeping into him since Kemper grabbed him in the hospital. The headaches first, and the total, paralyzing anxiety kept well enough at bay by the pills that everyone around him registers their disapproval of by completely ignoring. One night he describes the feeling to Wendy, whose severity is enhanced by her clear unwillingness to get this personal. He can’t blame her. Normally she’s as good a colleague as he could wish for: serious, invested, willing to go beyond the establishment way of doing things. A lesbian, too, if those transcripts are as true as Holden believes they are.

When her mouth thins to a point almost beyond visibility, Holden stops. If he goes any further, he senses, she will feel compelled to take some kind of action. Neither of them wants that. 

“Don’t tell Bill,” she says as he’s at the door. “He won’t be able to help himself. You know how he is with you.”

Wendy bows her head down towards the files on her desk and her brows pinch together in the way they always do. She slips back into her real life as though she hasn’t just killed him.

Holden manages to shut the door behind him before he presses back against it, desperate to catch his breath. 

In Norse myth, the god Baldr was killed by a bolt of mistletoe, the only living thing that could harm him. Imagine being beyond hurt, beyond death, and then to have some bright green thing bloom from inside you. And now Holden knows it too, a bursting riotous sprig of _feeling_ that skewers him to the wood behind him.

Since he’s brought this into the world—this new way of holding violence up to a light—no one has been any sort of way with him. Not really, not even before all of this had there ever been someone. Debbie had been perfect and then she suddenly hadn’t been anything more than a shape in the fog to him. If he could have walked away, or been fired, or never been here at all, Debbie would still be perfect. He thinks about calling her, though she’d never talk to him, or going out and trying to live again.

Instead he goes home and lies on top of the covers and stares at the ceiling. There’s nothing for him to see up there except the vague three-dimensionality of the paint. He wonders if things could have gone differently with Wendy. They couldn’t have, of course. Maybe Ed would understand. The thought of calling Ed Kemper in the middle of the night to talk about what amounts to a very long nightmare makes Holden laugh, and once the laughter takes hold he can’t get it to stop. That’s how he eventually falls asleep, hands folded primly over his stomach, bright pinpricks at the corners of his eyes.

+

At work, after Atlanta, they are all askew and meaner for it. Wendy sticks dutifully to her analyses and her appearance grows even tighter and more controlled, if that were possible. What she turns out is sharp enough to cut. Holden’s no psychologist but he’s confident in saying that she’s sublimating. 

“There’s a sexologist—”

“A what?”

“The word is pretty transparent, I think.”

Bill raises his eyebrows, but gestures for Wendy to continue.

Her stride remains unbroken. “He’s just published on a new concept: the lovemap.”

This time Holden starts to interrupt her, so she turns to him and when their eyes meet Holden has a sudden awful feeling of something scratching from inside his ribs and closes his mouth.

“Again, a straightforward name. But think about it; this is a sex thing for so many of the guys we interview. And not even in a particularly interesting way. It’s just sex and violence cojoined. In this model, we’d say that this is because of a specific childhood trauma or traumas..and then…”

Holden’s nodding vigorously at her even though his vision is starting to crowd at the edges and the ground has dropped beneath his feet.

“We’d be able to connect the dots! How he kills, how he thinks of love, how he grew up, who he is.”

“Exactly!” Wendy jabs at him with her marker, with a now-rare smile curling through her mouth.

Holden can’t help the bubbling giggle that lifts up and out of the joy that’s welling in him.

Bill is looking at both of them with a pinched expression. Things have been hardest for Bill since Atlanta; Nancy still hasn’t come back. Bill won’t move, won’t talk about, won’t do anything but his job. Bill’s lost his wife and son because of this job in painful stages and now there isn’t anything left for him to lose. 

Holden aches for him. He’s so glad that Nancy and Brian are gone, or that he hasn’t had to see them, more precisely. He can’t guess what he would see, but that it would be horrible. Whatever Brian did or didn’t do, Holden would see it, and it would see him—they could see each other now, in the shitty little basement office, just there behind Bill and it’s the worst thing Holden’s ever felt and then,

he shivers and blinks and the room is back to the regular number of occupants. But Wendy’s smile has dropped off her face and she looks concerned more than anything.

“This is more or less testable,” she tells them, still watching Holden. “I mean, we won’t be able to publish it, but they’ll eat it up upstairs.”

He knows what she means and swallows down anticipation.

+

Nancy is still gone when Alaska calls and asks for their help, so Holden and Bill talk it out over beers in the shell of Bill’s living room. The furniture is still there—Nancy still hasn’t tried to get anything back from the house—and Bill hasn’t changed the walls or the carpet, but it feels like a crime scene to Holden. 

Like there are no colors anymore. Even Bill seems to be behind some sort of glass. Holden thinks of reaching out but at the last minute swings his beer to his lips instead. They’re here to talk about a detective in Alaska with three dead bodies and a theory. If Holden tries to bring up anything else, Bill will throw him out. Holden’s not stupid, so he sticks to business. They need to decide who’s going out there. Holden wants both of them to go. He isn’t sure if Bill really wants anything.

It comes down to the budget and Holden’s passionate defence of spending every penny of it.

“If we don’t use all of it that’ll just be an excuse for them to cut it again.”

“Fine,” Bill caves.

Holden lets himself grin. “So, Alaska. I wonder what it’s like up there.”

“Cold as shit, probably,” Bill says.

Holden huffs a laugh and tries a different approach.

“I can’t believe they want us to come out even after Atlanta.”

“Atlanta would’ve been a shitshow even if we hadn’t showed up. They know that.”

Holden nods in acknowledgement.”We should have— it shouldn’t have been such a fuck-up. There was something there, and I could almost see it. If I could have, we could have caught the guy.”

“Well, yeah, I think everyone involved feels that way.”

“No, that’s not what I mean,” Holden says. He leans forward and gestures with his beer; he’s only three deep but his head is spinning. “I can see—”

Bill leans forward, mirroring him. “See what?”

Wendy’s mistletoe blooms in his chest. _Don’t tell Bill, he can’t help himself._

He’s already taken everything from this man.

“Nothing. Obviously. I’m not seeing anything.”

It isn’t graceful and he leaves minutes afterwards, and doesn’t talk to Bill until they’re en route to Anchorage.

+

Holden wishes Atlanta had been this way. His physical symptoms have subsided almost to the point of disappearing and as soon as his boots touch now his eyesight is sharper than it ever was in Atlanta. Maybe the bright, cold reflecting surfaces of the ice that captures whatever it is Holden can see now, and filters it down into something his living human brain can handle.

It’s still too much. At the morgue they rush at him so suddenly that he falters. Bill catches him at his elbow, with the pressure of his fingers going all the way down to the bone. Holden avoids eye contact and tries to focus on the woman in front of them. 

“We haven’t been able to identify her,” Detective Ashburne tells them.

Holden feels like screaming. He feels screaming in his bones actually, and has to turn his face from the woman’s body to the detective beside him. 

Bill is watching closely. Holden can sense his preemptive disapproval. It doesn’t matter; Holden will get his way anyway, and it’ll probably be the right way and they both know it.

Now, though, he just goes through the motions. All three of the women were killed in a similar fashion, and when Holden sees each of them he just _knows_ , in the same way he knows where his hands are and how to move them. The same man killed these women, and he’s probably killed many before and is looking forward to a life of killing more.

Tomorrow he’ll force Ashburne to endure his enthusiastic presentation on profiling as a concept, but for tonight he just wants to lie down and close his eyes as quickly as possible.

Bill notices but graciously doesn’t say anything until Holden is fully in bed, eyes closed and hellbent on ignoring the scratchiness of hotel sheets.

“Are you okay?” Bill’s voice is thick. Holden takes a moment to wonder what Bill could possibly have come up with to explain Holden’s behavior. His voice is thick and on the edge of sleep.

He can’t tell Bill. Wendy’s still right. Especially now, when Holden thinks he can finally use this to his advantage. So it’s fine. He’s fine.

“I’m fine,” he says, and slips under.

+

One night it actually does get so cold that they end up sharing one bed and both sets of blankets.

“Do you think we’d be able to handle this if we’d grown up here?”

“Don’t wanna hear it,” Bill huffs behind him. His breath rushes across Holden’s ear with a welcome kiss of heat. 

Holden just hums in assent. It is past 2:30 AM, according to the horrible little motel clock that has kept red watch over them night after night. By rights Holden should be asleep, too. It’s exhausting work, first to endure the sensation and then to translate into something meaningful. Every night when he turns in he feels like he’s just gone three rounds with a train and he’s out as soon as his head hits the pillow. His sleep is deep and dreamless, his once reprieve.

But tonight Bill’s body heat seeps through his layers and for the first time in weeks Holden’s eyelids don’t feel leaden. He doesn’t see anything most nights here, but this is the first time he’s felt relief at that. By now it’s a foreign feeling and it worms its way up Holden’s throat until he finds that he’s crying, Sensation comes in waves of fat, messy, quiet tears. For a minute he thinks he’s gotten away with it, that Bill’s too dead asleep to know what’s happening, and then that thought brings a fresh round of sobbing, and then he hears Bill draw an unsteady breath.

Holden still as much as he can, but that only makes his breathing more erratic. There’s nothing for it but to shake through the emotion, like an anxiety attack, and when it’s gone to move to the other bed. 

Bill’s palm between his shoulder blades brings everything to a halt.

“This is going to kill you,” Bill says.

“Of course it is,” Holden says, and in that moment he realizes it’s true, that no matter how he dies it will be because of this, because of whatever has happened to him to make him see these things.

That revelation brings a sudden crust of fear to the pools of tears behind his eyes.

_You know how he is with you._

He can’t breathe, so Holden focuses on Bill’s palm and fingers on his back, and tries to draw himself in to those points and stay still, stay here in this body and in this world. Bill’s hand is so big, which shouldn’t be a surprise but is, in the dark blue night of the room.

He’s sick with how much he’s wanted this. 

Bill’s hand stays. Holdent doesn’t tell him anything. When they wake the heater’s on even stronger and they’ve moved away from one another in their sleep.

+

Their profile’s dead-on. Ashburne nails the guy after they’ve left but they’d gotten him down to a tee. Wendy looks fiercely proud when they find out, and even Holden can smell the change on the wind. This was a media triumph as far as the FBI’s concerned. Their budget doesn’t get cut; it grows. They hire a couple of more people to interview. They start to formalize training materials. Wendy builds up enough goodwill that she can go back to doing interviews. Holden doesn’t ever try to talk to her again about what’s happening to him.

Nancy doesn’t come back, not yet, but she does talk to Bill on the phone, and afterwards Bill has a contented smile for days. Brian never comes up, or at least Bill never tells them anything about him, and every time Holden is as relieved as he always is that he never got a good look at the boy.

They don’t have any more monumental fuck-ups, and Holden gets better and better at maintaining his veneer of normalcy. At night he goes through his memories and holds each one up to the light, looks at what he saw and what he felt and then what he learned and what he knew. Every time he learns something new about how it works, about the horrible smear that violence leaves on a glass that only Holden can see. 

It’s as though he’s looking at a pattern and his eyes can’t agree on the focus depth, and suddenly he finds himself dislocated from reality.

Bill might even get the gist of it if Holden were to ever tell him. But he doesn’t deserve the curse of knowing, not with his life going as it is now.

So Holden carries it himself, those thousands of dark knowledges. He lets them hollow him out until they sit comfortably in the cradle of his body. He teaches dozens of agents how to profile and seeds the country with them. A few get daring and come to him alone to ask for his real secret to success, and for him to share it. And sometimes, if Holden is feeling benevolent, he agrees.

“First,” he says, “tell me where it hurts."


End file.
